Managing M365 Licenses & Economic Survival in the Covid Era | DSM

Posted on 23 November, 2021 by Digital Software Market

Globally businesses are going resilient in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic as they struggled to keep quarantined employees productive while acclimating to their remote workplace. As the offices around the world are approaching to re-open in phases, IT leaders are trying their best to trim budgets and C-level directives to some extent. Typically organizations rebuild a decimated sales pipeline, so the tech leaders are currently re-evaluating each and every process, and investment to ensure an ROI-focused environment.

 

Workstations running with Microsoft Office 365 (formerly Office 365) have already won over their competitors and are ahead of the competition in maintaining continuity in the business game. Microsoft 365 platform was designed to be catastrophe-proof. The M365 is redundant in extra servers and multiple network cards, through replication, data redundancy is eliminated across multiple data centers. M365 is also continuously monitored by internal Microsoft teams for its seamless performance and operations to quickly diagnose any functionality-related issues.

 

It is quite evident that cloud adoption and M365 enthusiastically increase overall business productivity, but recent massive cloud transformation has led to challenges.

 

Unfortunately, the platform is beneficial only when properly used. Recent Microsoft 365 License Optimisation Report revealed that enterprises are struggling with M365 application adoption, ultimately leading to unnecessary costs through poor license management. Organizations often find them in three problems:

First IT departments purchase too many licenses

Secondly, pay for inactive and non-productive licenses and not assigned to new users who join the organization

Finally purchased licenses contain apps that have no use to the current employee usage.

 

Even though M365 is not dependent on on-premise tools and applications to function properly and can not fail and run in the cloud, inactive M365 licenses consume the budget of the companies and are required to pay for users through individual licenses unnecessarily, whether selected users have adopted the applications available to them or not. IT departments are solely responsible to track down the licensing and optimize the extremely difficult task which can cause immense monetary pressures on businesses.

 

Mismanaged Licenses:

Companies are not fully aware of the potential features of Microsoft 365

Inactive licenses: M365 licenses are not used within a prescribed number of days and are assigned for a specific period.

Underutilized and oversized licenses: Licenses come with productive apps but are not being used because employees don’t need them or they don’t have enough knowledge and training to use them.

Unassigned licenses: Licenses that are purchased and available but not assigned to new employees.

 

Furthermore, the Microsoft 365 License Optimisation Report also found that most Microsoft 365 licenses are underutilized or oversized because the employees don’t need to use those apps included in higher-tier licenses or they are not somewhat adequately trained to use them to their full potential. Businesses can definitely be served better if redundant licenses are eliminated or employees should be trained. But the fact remains that many enterprises are not paying attention to this seemingly innocuous area where cloud costs are increasing. 

If you want to be benefitted from the M365 pricing model, organizations should ensure the number of licenses needed, to whom it can be legitimately assigned, and should properly devise a strategy for each user according to their business.

 

How to Better Manage Licenses?

License management problems arise due to a lack of visibility for the cloud environment and not having enough understanding of the dynamic licensing needs of the organization.IT departments are not equipped effectively to manage license models and without a deep understanding of their workforce and needs, the correct number of M365 licenses can not be made available. 

 

IT executives must possess knowledge about the environment that can help in performing a better job in automating administrative workflows, and partitioning license pools – all of which simplifies the management of permissions, calculation of chargebacks, and audits.

 

Reports also revealed that organizations have failed in licensing management somehow and, on average, could reduce M365 costs to a major extent if they can make better purchasing decisions and learn to manage inactive licenses. Inactive licenses can either be eliminated or reassigned to new users. Having these mundane tasks transformed with significant improvements into SaaS environments enables businesses to major cost savings and boosts productivity. 

 

Upskill and Train Employees:

Buy Microsoft office keys with more advanced capabilities are higher tier M365 licenses and employees must be prepared to commit to upskilling and get trained to generate productivity gains from these licenses. If possible, organizations can run training seminars for employees remotely, and opt for other strategies to bridge this gap. 

The IT department must identify the best plans including implementing technology covering inactive, oversized, and duplicated M365 licenses and can cancel or reallocate them is an important first step. 

 

Final Call:

To thrive in today’s fast-evolving world, the business climate is getting highly competitive, and organizations must continue to support cloud-based apps devoting maximum time to driving application adoption.

As we’ve covered, this can lead to targeted adoption and training campaigns that increase usage, while maximizing companies’ Microsoft office 365 investment.

Source URL :- https://mdigitalsoftware.medium.com/managing-m365-licenses-economic-survival-in-the-covid-era-aa9d7d6dee1f

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